“Give your Bees the tools to provide excellent Customer Service”

Last week I ran a Customer Service training session in St Pierre Park in Guernsey with our client Travel Solutions; businesses are really like Hives. In the Hive, bees’ development progressions and movements are stimulated by the colony’s need, in a business environment, how can you NOT train your employees to perform better?

Training your employees isn’t just a need, it is simply a necessity. I felt so overwhelmed during the session how positive all the employees were; and for the employees having their company spending time and money on them, giving them the tools to provide Excellent Customer Service is also a proof of their commitment.

There are certain skills that employees need to master when they are facing their customers, regardless of the type of contact that you have with customers, whether it is over the phone, face-to-face, in a restaurant or shop, in an office or financial institution, in the entertainment or tourist industries, good customer service skills help everybody.

Some which are basics such as polite, friendly, smiling, helpful, but some others don’t come as naturally and need a little bit of practice to give them more confidence. Take one example: asking questions? this is a very big part of any customer facing employees, the more open questions you asked, the more information you will receive from the customer, the more efficiently you can give them exactly what they needs. Another example would be “Selling”, you can’t sell anything if you don’t know your product or service, if you go in a restaurant and ask the waiter what is the soup of the day, he will never be able to sell that soup if he doesn’t know what it is today! Same with any products or service, the first part of any sell if the product knowledge. But employees don’t like the word “selling”, it refers to the old days of the double glazing window sales person, coming to your door and not leaving until you have signed on the dotted line. Selling now-days need to be about benefits and what’s in it for your customers?

So, take the time to train your employees on your products, what are the benefits for the customer then what are the features, always starts with the benefits and show them how it will meet their needs. A feature is simply a characteristic of your product or service, such as a Camera that shoots up to 10 megapixels, well the benefit could be that more megapixels will produce a better photo and a better way to capture important memories; this will mean more to the customer than a technical description.

With all of the Travel Solutions team, we also did a little exercise on the Vision Statement, and together we created their vision, a really great way to bring your employees with you on your business journey.